By way of Instapundit comes this observation from John Hinderaker, based on Rasmussen polling data:

It’s a paradox: voters prefer Republicans on the issues, but still lean toward voting for Democrats. One could speculate about why that is true; I think it is obvious that the press’s ceaseless attacks on Republicans are part of the explanation.

It’s not just the press; it’s the entire slate of culture-setters who’ve been peddling an astonishingly unchanging narrative for the past half-century and more.  That’s how a population comes to feel that a group with whom it mostly agrees is somehow against it.

The same thing applies with respect to attitudes toward religion.  The other day, I took a brief timeout from a busy schedule to hang out with a non-religious acquaintance.  He had just seen a news report on one of the non-Fox cable news networks of something that former Pope Benedict had written in a letter.  Per usual media practice, it was clear that the report had taken a secondary point from the text and made it primary and then, for good measure, distorted what Benedict was saying.  But my acquaintance took up the topic in exactly the way the news report had presented it.

Then we watched some British show on PBS that was unarguably written with an irreligious, liberal ethos.  At one point in the episode, an older pair of atheists had an appointment to speak with a vicar about having their wedding in the local church — for aesthetic reasons, naturally.  The writers had put just about the most simplistic arguments in the mouth of the actress playing the vicar, and she played the part with a sneer while denying the request.  My acquaintance argued against the character as if with actual statements from a figure in the Church of England, not a figment of some progressive’s imagination.

In addition to a wont for arguing with the television, he and I also share many of the same cultural and political views, which means he shares many of the cultural and political views of relatively orthodox religious organizations.  And yet, the representatives of those organizations fit comfortably into his view of the villain.

Any conservative with a passing interest in cinema will have had the experience (many times over) of hearing distilled liberalism written into the script for ostensibly conservative bad guys.  Other times, a character espousing conservative talking points will behave in ways that are plainly contradictory to conservative beliefs.  (I use “conservative” in its modern sense as a political classification.)  In this case, the audience is meant either to associate conservatism with the bad actions without considering consistency or to understand overt conservatives to be naked hypocrites.

In how many action films does the hero behave to a conservative T while either expressing no politics or exuding Hollywood liberalism, while the bad guy is clearly marked as a conservative of some sort while doing things that would more naturally follow from progressive political theory?  So many that is was actually remarkable when Paramount Pictures allowed Captain America to articulate beliefs from the pre-1960s United States.

Half a century after that benighting decade, it appears that a large proportion of Americans (who, to be sure, do not follow policy debates as closely as they ought to) have a completely false picture of who stands for what and a nearly hypnotic belief that voting for Republicans is somehow morally wrong.  One side “stands for the working man” in the way a circus trainer is “an animal lover,” but the other side is portrayed as supporting rugged individualism in the way of a dictator.